Cartomancy, Book 2 of The Age of Discovery

Tonight, I finished reading Cartomancy by Michael A. Stackpole. It is Book 2 of The Age of Discovery series. It is a complex story - one in which initially I had a hard time keeping track of all the characters. But I have not read A Secret Atlas which is Book 1 in the series and that may have contributed to this situation. However, by the time I got into the second half of the book and the closer I got towards the end, the more entwined and fascinated I became by the story. It is a novel of the fantasy genre and at least to me shows some of the futility of excessive ambition and wars.